The change on many U.S. campuses this year runs far deeper than the visible clichés of long hair, rock, sex, pot and protest. The old hierarchy of formal education is under attack. Spurred by the "free university" movement (TIME, June 6), more and more campuses seek a new equality between teachers and students. The new vision is a kind of academic Eden where students create their own courses, without grades or formal classes, and the key scene is the group-encounter session that joins teachers and students in working out their hang-ups together.
Appalling? Perhaps. Yet as far back as the 17th century the noted Czech school reformer Johann Amos Comenius wrote: "I seek a method by which the teachers teach less and the learners learn more." Comenius and scores of subsequent idealists argued that formal education suffocates the "need to know" —that the key to authentic learning lies not in numbing young minds with abstract facts, but in freeing the student to study what interests him most: himself and his relation to the world.
Precisely this approach is now being tested in a remarkable experiment run by the otherwise conventional University of Redlands in Redlands, Calif. Somewhat to its own surprise, Redlands has opened a new school this fall called Johnston College that could be a wavelet of the future. Says the brochure: "The touchstone for decision making will be this question: What will most effectively promote the personal and social growth of the individual?"
Johnston College owes much of its philosophy to Pressley C. McCoy, its 43-year-old chancellor, who began resisting academic barriers soon after he got his Ph.D. in political science and communications at Northwestern University. While teaching at Denison University, McCoy realized that departmental boundaries were an obstacle because "to understand communications, my students needed to know sociology, logic, economics and philosophy." As president of the Central States College Association, he later forged a twelve-campus "university" with commonly shared students, labs, computers and libraries. Last year McCoy joined a ten-day encounter group in Georgia—and yearned to adapt the experience to teaching.
McCoy had long pondered "how much your life is governed by feelings. The trick is to make the emotion work for you, instead of against you." McCoy decided that he had learned how to do it in the encounter session: "You need frank feedback on who you are. When you get that, you become so much more honest that you're bound to function better."
At about the same time, the University of Redlands trustees were discussing expansion. Among them was Dwayne Orton, a pioneering educator who helped design IBM's multi-million-dollar-a-year educational program. Anxious to liven up Redlands, Orton persuaded Millionaire James G. Johnston, a retired IBM vice president in his 80s, to contribute his name and $1,750,000 to endow an experimental college. The trustees then hired McCoy to overcome what he defined as the two basic problems in education: rigidity in attitude and rigidity in structure.